A pioneer in the Los Angeles 1960s Pop and Conceptual Art scenes, Ruscha has become one of the most respected and influential artists in the world, recognized and celebrated by international museums and collections. With his language-based paintings and his investigations of the American landscape, Ruscha has chronicled the transformations of popular culture and created a new contemporary aesthetic that combines the classic with the vernacular, discovering a cool perfect elegance in the dullness of junk space.

From his childhood cartoon drawings to his work as a professional sign painter, Ruscha’s early influences remain at the heart of his practice. His gunpowder, pigment, and pastel drawings of words incorporate industrial typefaces and illusionistic renderings of text that flow like ribbons or liquid across the paper. Often illuminated by flashes of searchlights, Ruscha’s paintings of common objects and urban night scenes evoke atmospheres culled from Hollywood movies, casting a dark shadow on American myths of affluence and success. His paintings of deadpan phrases such as “I Dunno” and “Just Us Chickens” read like absurdist love poems written in the sky. In Ruscha’s work, language and architecture are used to build pictures that radiate with the optimism of 1950s highway billboards – heavenly roadside visions as tempting and fleeting as a mirage.

For the High Line, Ruscha will present his first public commission in New York City, a large-scale work hand-painted by a professional mural company on the side of an apartment building adjacent to the High Line at West 22nd Street. One of his few public art works ever realized, Ruscha’s mural combines his interests in architecture, language, and public space to create a dry and humorous commentary on life in the contemporary metropolis. Like many of Ruscha’s greatest works, this new commission both exalts and criticizes the romance of city life, instantly turning the urban experience into a dialogue worthy of a Hollywood comedy or a Jack Kerouac novel.

Camouflaged in the architecture surrounding the High Line, Ruscha’s giant street sign reads like a speech bubble emanating directly from the streets of New York – a collective thought balloon hovering on the High Line like a silent soundtrack for a new symphony of the city.

Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce Jonathas de Andrade’s first one-person exhibition in North America. The installations, sculpture and photographic works to be exhibited date from 2013 to 2015 and address socio-economic issues in contemporary Brazil.

In two multi-part installations, (Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste and 40 nego bom é 1 real), both from 2013, Andrade questions the influential but controversial ideas of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, particularly as expressed in his 1933 publication Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Master and the Slave). In this text, Freyre suggests a lived experience of racial-democracy in Brazil, which he believed to be a result of miscegenation between Portuguese colonizers, Africans, and Native Brazilians.

Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste (Posters for the Museum of the Northeast Man) is inspired by an existing institution, the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, an anthropological museum in Recife, founded in 1979 and largely inspired by Gilberto Freyre’s theories on ‘racial democracy’. In this project Andrade visually reimagines the identity of the museum. Beginning in 2012 the artist advertised in local newspapers calling for workers interested in posing for photographs advertising the museum. Photographing participants in everyday situations, Andrade created 70 posters with notes documenting the encounters. Through this collection of images and notes Andrade examines how an anthropological approach influences the representation and understanding of cultural and personal identities. The artist continues to use the Museu do Homem do Nordeste as inspiration for parallel projects some of which can be seen in his survey exhibition currently at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) in Rio de Janeiro.

The title of the installation, (a collaborative project with Silvan Kaelin), 40 nego bom é 1 real (40 black candies for R$ 1,00), is drawn from the name of a popular candy in northeastern Brazil. ‘Nego bom’ which can be literally translated as ‘good black’ is a colloquial albeit affectionate term with colonial connotations. Inspired by a street vendor promoting his sweets at the top of his voice, the work consists of two parts and tells the story of the production of the sweet and exposes the falsity of the supposed good-natured working relations between employers and employees. Through this narrative Andrade probes the complex social dynamics of post-colonial Brazil through the locus of cheap labor.

In 2014 Andrade invited the workers from a refinery in Condado to participate in the creation of his most recent work, ABC de Cana, (Sugar Cane ABC). Inspired by a 1957 ‘alphabet’ drawing by Luis Jardim which uses sugar cane motifs, the work consists of 26 images of workers forming the alphabet with sugar cane stalks.

Jonathas de Andrade was born in 1982 in Maceió, Brazil; he lives and works in Recife. A survey of his work is on view at Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro through March 22. Past solo exhibitions include Instituto Cultural Itaú, São Paulo (2008); Instituto Cultural Banco Real, Recife (2009); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2010); Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2013, 2010); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2013); and Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2013). He participated in the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, (2009); São Paulo Biennial (2010); Istanbul Biennial (2011); New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables, New York (2012); Lyon Biennial (2013) and the 11th Dakar Biennial (2014). Jonathas de Andrade's work was included in Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2014.

Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of Cuts on paper and a neon Wall by Stephen Antonakos (1926-2013). This is the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery.

The Cuts, 1977-1978

In the summer of 2014 a brilliant group of previously unknown drawings — Cuts — were found in storage. Each surface was thickly covered all over with Antonakos’s characteristic “back-and-forth” color hatching — in deep tones of blue and green, a few red, and one yellow. On some, severe incomplete circles were then cut through the surface; on others, incomplete squares. From still others, incomplete squares were cut from the edges. Each one is marked with the month and year, showing the speed and intensity — apparently the urgency — he felt in covering the surfaces so actively, so more-than-completely. The discovery of this distinct early series adds a lush, concrete chapter to the already rich story of Antonakos’s Cuts from 1977 and 1978. (Antonakos continued with Cuts steadily through 2012 in the forms of drawings, collages, and Artist’s Books — on a range of papers and vellums and gold-leaf on Mylar.)

This exhibition includes Cuts of radically different approaches. One series of only two large white sheets has narrow lines cut out and backed with colored paper. A group of five has cuts and colored or black geometric forms that re-define the white spaces. A third, powerful, group of black squares has a different angle every time — every one a “stopper” from an artist known for light and space. Still more variations include bright blue squares on black papers and crackling, cut, white or red sheets layered over black. Finally, from 1978, there are the grand, serene, almost sculptural double-whites.

In Antonakos’s Cuts it is rare to see a form removed and placed somewhere else — as in Matisse’s eternally grand, colorful, and sensuous Cut-Outs. Nor did Antonakos’s Cuts effect anything like the “curl back” of Fontana’s elegant singular or repetitive slashes on canvas. With Antonakos we may envision the cut in the surface, the “completed” circle or square it suggests, and even the surface before the cut — perhaps a kind of a multiple-time experience.

“Four Blue Incomplete Neon Circles,” 1977

This early Wall was made for a breakthrough exhibition in Greece in 1977. By good luck, the key wall in Gallery II has just the correct proportions for it. This is one of the artist’s most serene works, even with its dynamic possibility of viewers completing the blue incomplete circles in their minds.

Antonakos’s Walls — like all of his work — start with the consideration of “where” — a place’s specific scale, proportions, and architectural function. The first work titled a Wall is from 1970; the last is from 2008. Some are chromatically intense and formally dramatic, others move more calmly. On some, the linear neons extend past the edges or project into the viewer’s space. A few cover two or three related wall surfaces or go around interior or exterior corners. Others might be categorized as Rooms. Like all the neon work, the Walls are intended to engage and enliven their surrounding spaces — the spaces that contain the viewer.

Viewers may remember seeing the 1978 “Blue Incomplete Circle on a Blue and Red Wall” last season in Phong Bui’s important “Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1” mega-show in Industry City, Brooklyn. That work’s two-colored field and its intensely focused neon form contrast greatly with this Wall’s softer color and the gentle, rhythmic overlapping of its potentially-complete blue circles.

Stephen Antonakos’s work with neon since 1960 has lent the medium new perceptual and formal meanings in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions first in New York and then internationally. His use of spare, complete and incomplete geometric forms has ranged from direct 3-dimensional interior installations to painted Canvases, Walls, the well known back-lit Panels with painted or gold-leaf surfaces, and the Rooms and Chapels. Throughout, he has conceived work in relation to its site — its scale, proportions, and character — and to the space that it shares with the viewer. He called his art, “real things in real spaces,” intending it to be seen without reference to anything outside the immediate visual and kinetic experience. Starting in the 1970s he installed over 50 large-scale Public Works with the same concerns plus the inevitably broader engagement of space and natural light outdoors. Colored pencil drawings on paper and vellum, often in series, have been an equally rich practice since the 1950s, as have his various approaches to collage. He has also made conceptual Packages, small-edition Artist’s Books, reliefs of white wood and silver, prints, and — since 2011 — several series of framed and 3-dimensional gold leaf works. There have been over 100 one-person shows — almost all of new work — including a 50-year retrospective seen in Athens and the US in 2007-8.

Antonakos: 1977-1978, Cuts and a Wall will be on view from February 19 – March 21, 2015. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 19th from 6-8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact Joseph Bunge at (212) 750-0949 or by email at joseph@loribooksteinfineart.com.

Kent Fine Art is pleased to present Pablo Helguera:
Strange Oasis, January 31–March 14, 2015, with a
reception for the artist on January 30, 6–8 pm.

Pablo Helguera (b. 1971, Mexico City) is an interdisciplinary artist with an interest in socially engaged art and performance. His work as an educator has often influenced his work as an artist, often incorporating language and literature to articulate and address local cultural and social issues. “La Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego / The School of Panamerican Unrest” (2003–2011) is regarded as one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of socially engaged art. Helguera
collaborated with more than forty organizations and over a hundred artists, curators, and activists during this period. Since then, Helguera has composed installations including “Libreria Donceles” (KFA 2013) in which the artist facilitated the establishment and subsequent itinerancy of a Spanish-language bookstore, thus conflating the aesthetic experience of Mexico City’s old bookstores with the politics of the Spanish language across the US-Mexico border. Since then, “Libreria Donceles” has been re-established for the Kadist Art Foundation (San Francisco), for Arizona State University (Tempe) and soon for Red Hook, Brooklyn. Locally, Helguera was also featured at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival with “The Parable Conference”, “Crossing Brooklyn” at the Brooklyn Museum with “1899 (Susannah Mushatt Jones)”, and at the Guggenheim Museum’s recent exhibition “Under the Same Sun” with the performance “On the Future of Art”.

In “Strange Oasis”, Kent Fine Art becomes the stage and platform for new iterations and re-stagings of the artist’s recent interventions, which took place throughout the Americas and Europe. Some of the projects presented include Société Civile pour l’Enterrement de Pensées Mortes for Rectangle, Brussels, 2013, Nuevo Romancero Nuevomejicano for Site Santa Fe’s thematic exhibition “Unsettled Landscapes,” and Vita Vel Regula (Rules of Life) for the Renata Bianconi Gallery in Milan.

The exhibition’s title comes from the essay on the phenomenology of play titled “Oasis of Happiness” by German philosopher Eugen Fink. In his essay, Fink refers to play as a “strange oasis, an enchanted rest-spot in [man’s] agitated journey.” Helguera’s
interventions, which use history, geography, and language, create parenthetical experiences, projections into other places, times, and physical spaces. According to the artist, the interactive projects in this exhibition come from the interest in creating “parenthetical experiences” that extract the viewer from daily routine by engaging them in leisurely activities that can acquire very personal interpretations.

The various projects presented here address geography, location, and time, focusing on the significance of human relationships and the limits of communication and language.

In Helguera’s games and rituals the past is never buried, but instead is ever-present, establishing a “temporal present” necessary for engagement. In “Société Civile pour l’Enterrement de Pensées Mortes”, a room houses the ashes of dead and obsolete thoughts, as once guarded over by a Belgian sect of freethinkers during the turn of the century. In “Nuevo Romancero Nuevomejicano”, a velvety space mimics the lobby and gambling table of an illegal casino in pre-war New Mexico, circa 1836. By playing a variety of old gambling card games, visitors are told of their future through the divinatory legends based on the history of the US-Mexico War.

A special feature of this exhibition will be interactive Saturday afternoons (12–5 pm) with the recreation of “Nuevo Romancero Nuevomejicano” and“Société Civile pour l”Enterrement de Pensées Mortes.” For further information, please contact Katrina Neumann (KNeumann@kentfineart.net) or the gallery website at www.kentfineart.net.

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition with Olivier Mosset, featuring recent large-scale monochromes. For nearly 50 years, Mosset's paintings have challenged conventional notions of artistic originality and production. The current exhibition groups paintings of varying shape and scale, emphasizing the artist's continual consideration of surface, color, environment, and repetition.

Mosset's radical approach to painting first captured international attention in the late 1960s, when Olivier Mosset joined Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni to form the “non-group” BMPT in Paris. BMPT aimed to distance the act of painting from its display, formal abstraction from myth, and singular authorship from value. BMPT criticized the Modernist canonization of “pure painting”, as well as the institutional framework of the art world at large. Highly collaborative in practice, the artists often conflated their own identities through public performances in which they produced artworks in tandem.

In his current work, Mosset continues to mine these themes. The four largest canvases on view each pay homage to an influential figure or peer that the artist has encountered over the course of his international career, from Bern, Switzerland, to Tucson, Arizona, to New York City. Respectively, Alfred Leslie is green; Robert Breer is blue; Alex Hay is brown; and Duane Zaloudek is grey. Bearing the names of other artists, these paintings playfully entice the question: who is the maker? Mosset's signature, whether real or imagined, is not his concern.

All paintings exhibited in the gallery employ the use of polyurethane, a highly durable industrial material often used as truck-bed liner, which results in dense and grainy surfaces. Unmarked by gesture, Mosset's monochromes engage a materialist sensibility while remaining tethered to art historical discussions about appropriation and the readymade.

Olivier Mosset's (b. 1944, Bern, Switzerland) work has been included in exhibitions presented by museums, private galleries, and institutions, such as: Manifesta 10 (2014), the Whitney Biennial (2008), the Fifth Biennial of Paris, the Lyon Biennial (2003), the Times Square Show (1981), and the Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1967). His work is represented in numerous public collections including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Migros Museum, Zurich; and Musée des Beaux Arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, among others. The artist lives and works in Tucson and Brooklyn.

For further information please contact info@koenigandclinton.com or call (212) 334-9255. Hours of operation are Tuesday-Saturday, 11AM-6PM and by appointment.
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In her fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Rachel Owens incorporates the aesthetics of fashion retail, kindred to the art world. The artist’s own preoccupation is: Our compulsion to consume resources, real-estate, and each other at an unsustainable rate. For many years in New York I was employed as a window dresser and visual merchandiser in high end fashion stores, literally part of the “luxury” trade – it was how I survived in order to make the work critical of the very thing I was doing. I explore how and if the gallery is different from those shops and if sculpture is much different from handbags or property.

The centerpiece is a 10 foot tall replica of the gallery’s own front doors, cast in broken bottle glass and resin, with additional casts of the doors’ accompanying metal bumpers, architectural evidence of the building’s prior use as a parking lot. Alternately fragile and imposing, the two pieces formally reference both Pop and Minimalist eras, with antecedents in Serra’s propped steel and Oldenberg’s The Store, as aware in turn of Whiteread’s House as of art’s ever-fleeting fashions and the symbiotic role between art and real estate (including the repeated rise and demise through inevitable rent and tax hikes, as is now currently affecting Chelsea).

Other cast glass works include her POPs: the hands of six different women mounted on lifts as in a department store’s glove display. However, instead of graceful outstretched fingers, the hands are raised in clenched fists— alternately a symbol of solidarity, strength, or resistance and linked with myriad associations from ancient Assyrian goddess Ishtar to early 20th century American miners to civil rights and feminists movements. The title is an acronymic, short hand nod to the Power of People, and is simultaneously aware of historic and recent events in addition to the cartoon onomatopoetic sounds of a cartoon punch.

Nearby, a round table alludes to a footwear display and features eight colorful versions of her Heel, a cast of the artist’s foot with a metal screw in place of a stiletto one. In proper merchandising form, they encircle a pair of Boots, originally cast from a live horse. Another table features two large cast elephant tusks modeled on Satao, the enormous and renowned bull elephant in Africa, who was poached last June. Like with her Heels, the works are available in a variety of colors, more in line with retail expectations than art world norms. The accumulations of these fragments resonate like phantom limbs on the body politic.
In Skins (NYC), patchwork textile pieces of the five boroughs of New York City hang from hooks. Made from remnant and clearance leather from a luxury manufacturer, the boroughs are sectioned according to community boards and voting districts and color coded according to maps from the last census. The darkest parts of each map are less than 5% white and the lightest part of each map is less than 5% black. The scraps of our fetish are here reduced to simple demography. Everything is for sale. That fact is manifest in the small publication Q1Sp15, a photo essay that acts as a skeleton key to the conceptual backdrop of the show and is another direct merchandising reference. Inspired by retailers’ lifestyle catalogues (or “magalogues”), the work’s title uses fashion code for collections, here indicating its release in Quarter 1, Spring 2015.

Service Commitments and 1st @ Service are text pieces with corporate sales credos appropriated from the “employee’s only” sections of two luxury stores. Literally burned into canvas, the rules of the game are laid out clearly and provide the title for her exhibition, bringing to mind the comment of Stanley Marcus of the lavish Texas store Neiman Marcus: We try to impress on our people that service is half profession, half religion.

With this exhibition, Owens continues to reconcile her intellectual interests with a need to make unapologetically beautiful objects (almost always composed of trashed and recycled materials). The New Yorker states “There’s an undeniable sweetness to Owens’s work, even when she tackles earnestly political subjects.” Public commissions have included for the Krasnoyarsk Biennial in Russia, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New York City Parks Department, the New Museum, and the Austrian Cultural Forum. Her monumental piece Inveterate Composition for Clare is currently on display at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville. Born in Atlanta and raised in Kansas City, Owens received a MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

“Mountains are the most painted motif in traditional ink-painting. Why is that?” Han Kyoung Won

Mountains are an ever-changing, yet constant element in our landscape. Their silhouette and colors shift with the seasons. In traditional Eastern landscape painting, painters do not just observe a mountain when they draw it. They physically go to a mountain. After experiencing the mountain tangibly and mentally, they are painted from the heart. This attitude is one of the attempts to get closer to Tao by being “united with nature.”
Trained as a traditional ink painter, Han Kyoungwon uses the philosophy of the “Tao”, in the creation of his “ash” landscapes – landscapes silhouettes that are created by burning on wood.
Han studied traditional landscape painting. During one of his visits to the mountains, he explored a method to reproduce the landscape, using “God’s tools”: Wood, fire and wind.

“The Hand of God” is the inaugural show of JanKossen in its New York gallery location.